Choices
by ashesandhoney
Summary: In a slightly different world, Feyre's wedding to Tamlin went as it was intended to for at least a few hours longer before everything went very wrong. An AU scenario. "A mating bond is fate, a Cauldron granted gift. It is not something that we, not the Priestesses with all their magic and herb gardens nor High Lords nor resurrected mortals are able to change."


Part 1: Revulsion and Calm

* * *

From the vantage point of the House of the Wind, the sunset was glorious. A blaze of oranges and pinks below the encroaching indigo of night. I watched the first stars appear as I downed the rest of my drink and glanced over at the rest of the little party. Azriel and Cassian had fallen into a drinking game I hadn't seen since our days in the war camps and was possibly more ridiculous now than it had been then. They'd had young and stupid to use an excuse back then. They were grown adults now flipping coins and pounding on tables and yelling at each other.

Cassian was a loud drunk. Really, Cassian was a loud anything. If it could be done a little louder, Cassian did it a little louder. I appreciated the distraction but even they were starting to lose their ability to push past my thoughts and pull me back to the world. I hadn't even been able to drink as much as I'd intended. I looked at the empty cup in my hand and considered trying harder. Truly black out drunk had to be a possibility if I just kept drinking long enough.

I was a miserable wreck and maybe explaining why out loud would make it better but Amren had already yelled at me once today and I didn't really want drunk Cassian adding to that or to watch Azriel go from jovial to quiet and careful and considering. I would just keep it to myself but I couldn't do that here, not now that the sun was setting and the day was over.

I didn't say goodbye.

I just stood up and walked off the edge of the balcony and let myself free fall until that point where I wasn't sure I could pull myself out of it. The wind whistled in my ears and my wings shuddered with the impact when I snapped them open to stop myself before I splattered onto the rocks below. I flew in slow lazy circles around the city. I started to pick up speed with each pass. The cold air was washing away the ineffectual drunkenness I had been wallowing in and maybe if I pushed myself hard enough, I could trade in misery for exhaustion.

Not that I was likely going to sleep tonight. If I fell asleep there was too much risk of my shields slipping. That they hadn't slipped in centuries didn't really matter. I was going to let them slip. Maybe that's why I couldn't let myself get drunk enough to forget because I wouldn't forget. I'd just do something stupid I would reach for her along that bond and that wasn't something I would survive. Not today.

She had been unhappy all day.

Nervous.

Miserable.

Frightened.

I stopped those thoughts in their tracks as I banked left and shot down to fly close enough to the Rainbow and the river to hear snippets of music and conversation. She wasn't frightened. I wanted her to be frightened so I would be justified in getting involved, so I would have a reason to hit her fiancé with all the anger and worry and jealousy that had been eating at me for the past three months.

No.

Husband.

The banquet and the dancing would be starting to wrap up around this time. Ceremonies complete, whatever passed as traditions in the Spring Court would have been observed. Not fiancé, not by this time in the night. Husband. She had married the bastard. She loved him and deserved the right to make that choice but he was still a bastard. They'd dance and eat and celebrate. Tamlin was a jackass but she deserved the celebration. I didn't have to like Tamlin. He wasn't my husband.

"No, he's your mate's husband and you can't see the issue with that?" a voice in the back of my head said in Amren's most irritated drawl.

I pushed up, catching an updraft and flapping hard to get as much height as I could out of it and once I was on level with the windows of the House of the Wind, I dropped into free fall again. I shut out every thought and just let the wind and the air and the rush of lights below me take over and I grinned in spite of everything and snapped my wings out in time to bank and spin and head for the town house.

If all else failed, I could still fly. I had the sky again. I could survive the rest. Even losing her.

I flew until I was tired and exhilarated and felt a little like myself again. I collapsed into the wide empty bed in the townhouse bedroom and stretched my wings out. I fell asleep without changing my clothes or taking off my shoes.

I don't know how much later it was when I woke to a sensation that brought Amarantha swimming up through the mental boundaries I'd worked so hard to keep around those memories.

Red hair in my face.

Wrongness.

Nails down my back.

Invasion.

That sound she had always made right near my ear.

Violation.

The sensation built. I rolled up out of bed, forgetting I had my wings out, stumbling around them as they caught on the sheets. I made it to the bathroom before I vomited. It took me a few moments of staring at the porcelain to realize the feeling wasn't coming from a nightmare. It was dragging my memories along with it but this wasn't my nightmare. This was coming from her.

"Feyre," I said.

I hadn't said her name since I'd explained who she was to Mor. I hadn't said her name even to myself.

I reached for her, pushing down the bond just like I'd promised myself I wouldn't do tonight and that violation hit me harder. I didn't wretch again but it took effort and I slammed all my barriers back into place. I was pretty sure it wasn't a memory or a nightmare pulling those feelings out of her. It was too strong for that. There was a persistent misery in her that seemed to press in around my shields. She was strong, not broken but miserable and the pounding sensation of violation made my skin crawl even with the shields in place.

I swore.

I was up and moving before I'd fully let the thought take form. My clothes shifted, the wings vanished, and I ran my fingers through my hair. I decided that I didn't really care if it looked like I had rolled out of bed. I had rolled out of bed. This was against every rule I had set for myself but there was something wrong. So wrong. I couldn't push it out and I could leave her to endure it. I wasn't going to be able to live with myself if I left her to endure this.

I didn't have a handle on my power. I wasn't aware of how angry I was, how furiously angry, until I tried to gather my magic to winnow. I let out a noise between a growl and a hiss. Far from civilized. I snapped the talons threatening to escape from my fingers back into place and winnowed before I could change my mind.

I did not expect them to be in bed. I hit the dark room, in the middle of the manor house, in the most tightly warded corner of the Spring Court without more than flicking the barriers out of the way. The anger crested as I realized that I'd winnowed to her and found her in his bedroom. Her bedroom. Their bedroom. If I'd been half sane, if I wasn't already skating on the thin ice of all those memories of Amarantha, if that sense of invasion wasn't stronger now that I was closer, I might have been able to talk myself down from what I did next.

"Feyre, it's time to leave," I said before Tamlin had even pulled himself fully up out of the blankets.

He was fast but I was more than ready to blow him into tiny little pieces if he touched either of us. I hadn't figured out what was going on yet but that lack of clarity just made the anger and the need to take her away from it worse. I needed her someplace safe so that we could fix this, whatever this was and she wasn't safe here. She couldn't be safe and be sending that much revulsion and discomfort down the bond.

Tamlin growled.

He was on his feet now, stalking toward me and his fingers sharpened to claws. Either you controlled the beast or it controlled you. It appeared that no one had ever taught Tamlin that particular lesson. Naked and clawed with fur rippling up his arms as well. I felt my rage try to shiver into talons of my own in answer and willed them back down. My very human hands adjusted my jacket and I watched him with the same cold vicious eyes that I usually saved for the Court of Nightmares.

He didn't attack. I would have attacked. Maybe it was just my mood talking but if an enemy had shown up in my bedroom, on my wedding night, I would have gone for their throat first and asked questions later. He didn't. Which meant I didn't kill him immediately. That cold anger in me regretted that he didn't give me the chance.

"What are you doing in here?" he snarled from only about a foot away from me.

"Calling in a bargain," I said finally remembering that this wasn't an act of war. I had the bargain to lean on. I was perfectly happy for it to be an act of war but I could just imagine Cassian's face if I told him I started a war over a woman. He'd never let me live it down. Millennia. It would be the story that dragged on for millennia.

Feyre's emotions were shifting along the bond and I wasn't shielding against her so I could feel each one like it was my own. That sensation of violation was becoming fear. Fine. She could be afraid of me as long as she was safe. I didn't look at her. I wasn't quite sure what I would do if I did. Was her expression terrified or nauseous? I couldn't let myself look, let myself know until we were far, far away from here. I flicked a finger and slammed the wardrobe door open and said, "Put on something."

Tamlin was talking and I flicked another hand. The bedroom door opened and I slowly pushed him through it. I did it slowly enough that he was very aware of what I was doing and very aware that he couldn't stop me. I held him still in the hallway and then slammed the door on his furious face.

That was petty.

I was being petty now.

I rolled my shoulders and looked at the door. I could hear him pound a few times before there was a scrape of claws and a low growl. I kept my eyes on the door even though the magic didn't need my attention to hold him. Maybe I should start a war, wipe Tamlin and his entire stupid court off the face of Prythian and install Mor as the High Lady of Spring, she was stronger than the shape-shifting bastard and she'd probably enjoy all the flowers.

"You chose now to call in the bargain?" Feyre hissed when she appeared at my side wearing a gown of draped pink fabric that probably wasn't meant to be worn with nothing underneath. Her hair was still half up in pins and ribbons from her wedding ceremony. She was disheveled and thin and something like horror was still beating in her. Horror at whatever had happened and not a small amount of horror at the fact that I was standing in front of her.

"Yes," I said.

I was afraid if I let out too many words and I'd open the floodgates of questions and accusations and demands for answers and that would only lead to declarations and promises and explanations that no one wanted to hear, least of all her. She was seething and she was terrified. I terrified her. My power swirled around us and I knew the anger in it had to be palpable.

I held out a hand.

"I am not going anywhere with you," she said.

"You'd rather get back in that bed?" I asked.

I was too close to the memories of Amarantha. I hadn't been able to get them back into the deep dark little box where they belonged in the back of my mind. That was a question I had asked myself too many times. I had always done it, it had always been worth it.

Feyre's lip curled at me but it wasn't really a choice I was making any more. The choice was already made. I had started it now. I'd said the words, I'd activated the bargain and magic had rules. She was coming with me or we'd all pay the price for a violated bargain.

She hated me so much and I could feel it and I think if I endured it for too long, I would start to hate myself too.

I fully expected that I'd have to grab for her but she glanced at the door and the bed and swallowed like she was swallowing back the same nausea that had awoken me and said, "A week."

"A week," I confirmed.

She looked at the door again and neither of us moved as Tamlin growled from behind it. Goddamn it, he was probably going to try and find a pretense to start a war regardless of the bargain. He sounded pissed.

She lifted her tattooed hand and held it just above mine. Now that she had come this far, I was loathe to snatch that hand out of the air and winnow us away. Choose it. Choose to come with me. Don't make me steal you. I kept my hand still and smoothed some of my emotions off my expression. I didn't give her the High Lord of the Night Court smile that I had given Tamlin with all its mocking rage. I just held her gaze and waited.

She placed her hand in mine.

Something like relief slid down the bond and I didn't ask any questions. I pulled her in closer and coiled my power back in around us and almost winnowed us back to the townhouse in Velaris by habit. It was where I had come from, it was where I would return to. I remembered at the last minute all the reasons I could not do that and brought her to the palace above the Hewn City instead.

She stepped back from me but didn't let go of my hand as we landed. I kept my hand still as I watched her stare in awe at the building around us with its fluttering curtains and views of the night over the mountains. Her surprise lasted only a moment before she snatched her hand back and took two quick steps away from me and crumpled to her knees. I thought she was going to retch and I felt the second hand roil of her nausea.

"Care to explain what happened?" I asked in a flat voice.

She was looking at the floor, her hair a tangle around her head and her dress looking insubstantial on her thin frame. Still beautiful. Like this when she was thin and terrified, when she was feverish and bleeding, when she was mud splattered and armed with nothing but broken bones. She was always beautiful.

She was also nauseous and shaking like we were in a snow storm. I crossed the space to her and dropped my jacket around her shoulders without touching her.

I sat down on the floor in front of her, crossed my feet like a child at lessons and conjured a pair of teacups. I drank out of mine and waited. She didn't move. She was folded over herself so that her forehead was pressed to her knees and she was breathing slowly and evenly. I needed answers but maybe she needed privacy more. I bit back every question and put all my attention on the tea.

She straightened slowly as though every inch was a battle and shrugged into the jacket. The black made her look even paler but she was regal in it as she drew herself up and set her jaw.

"What do you want from me?" she asked.

"I wanted that nausea and sense of," I waved my hand rather than name it, "To stop. Now that that's done, I'm content. Perhaps you could avoid it in the future."

She watched me with hard eyes as though calculating. She had tucked the jacket in around herself and it made her look tiny but not any less fierce. So goddamn beautiful. I was not at all prepared for having her this close. Near feral instinct was weaving its way through the tightly held threads of my rage and I was prepared to rip anyone to shreds if that's what it took to protect her. The feeling was stronger than I remembered it.

"It won't happen again," she said with venom in her voice.

I didn't ask again though that wasn't an answer.

She picked up her tea cup and pushed the sleeves of my jacket back away from her hands so she could hold it cradled between her palms. She looked at it but didn't drink it.

"Are you going to lock me away in a dungeon somewhere?"

"No."

I wanted to shake her and demand to know what had happened but I didn't. I waited. I turned up the lights in the lanterns up and down the hall as she swirled the tea in the mug. At this time of night, even the servants would be asleep. We might as well have been the only people in existence. Alone on a mountain top. The wind beyond the barriers howled but in here all that felt as distant as the moon.

"Drink something, it will make you feel better, I can have food brought up as well as they apparently don't have any in the Spring Court."

"That's what started it," she said rolling the tea cup between her hands.

"The lack of food available in Tamlin's household?"

She didn't rise to the bait. She didn't even sneer at me, she kept staring at her cup and breathing evenly. I realized too late that she was fighting for every breath. Each one was careful and measured because otherwise she was either going to hold it or hyperventilate. I bit my tongue to keep anything else from slipping out. I didn't know what it was that she did need but perhaps mocking condescension and poorly maintained rage were not on the top of the list.

"No, a drink," she said.

"Ah," I said as though I understood anything. The smug all-knowing act had won me more arguments than I was willing to admit. If people thought I already knew, they would volunteer the most interesting information and save me the trouble of burrowing into their minds. I understood nothing but the panic and the revulsion was retreating, even when I reach out along that bond, the emotions were calming. I did not get any closer to her mind than the edge of that bond. I would not do that too her.

"Ianthe had said that it could hasten the mating bond. She was so sure of it, that our bond just hadn't settled yet but that it would. I didn't expect it to feel like that," her lip curled.

"It's over," I said with a little more force than I had intended. I had reeled the anger in but having it tightly controlled didn't mean it wouldn't explode if I wasn't careful.

"It's not, I can still feel it. It's not as bad without," she paused and waved her hand in a mocking imitation of me that made me smile, "But it's there. I don't know how long it will last."

"Damiana?" I asked as the details slotted together in my head. It was a herb that the Priestesses kept a very close eye on. It only grew in their gardens. It was sacred to a few different rituals involving mating bonds but had no place being given out like candy at weddings.

She nodded.

"It really depends on how much you took. I knew a mated pair once who took enough to last a week, found a cabin in the woods somewhere and didn't come out until it had worn off. Usually it lasts about a day from what I know."

"A week, like that?" she asked spitting the last word like it was vulgar.

"No," I said. "That, as you so eloquently put it, was because the draught is intended to heighten a mating bond and as Tamlin is, evidently, not your mate, your body reacted badly to it. I suppose it could work the way the way Ianthe wanted it to if he was but even that seems unlikely. A mating bond is fate, a Cauldron granted gift. It is not something that we, not the Priestesses with all their magic and herb gardens nor High Lords nor resurrected mortals are able to change. You don't get to force what the Cauldron has or has not willed."

I stopped talking, my anger was leaking into my tone again. Ianthe was arrogant and manipulative and I hadn't even considered that Feyre might be one of her targets. A piece of me felt responsible for having left her alone with that woman. I could have sent a warning perhaps. But I already knew what would have happened if I had. She would have ripped that warning up and tossed in the fire because Feyre trusted me about as much as she trusted a poisonous snake.

Feyre pulled herself up, leaving the tea on the floor and moving towards the balcony on bare feet that I could just catch glimpses of through the swirl of pink fabric. Her distance gave me a moment to collect myself. With the mountain range spread out below us and a soaring wind whistling across the star flecked sky, I could get my anger back in check. I followed her once it was reeled in and leaned against the white stone rail. She was too far away to touch but close enough that I could make it to her if she needed me.

"It's usually used by mated pairs who have struggled to produce children. The things it does to the mating bond is a side effect," I added because if they hadn't explained the rest of it, they likely hadn't explained that either.

Anger spiked and I thought it was mine until she hurled the china cup out into the abyss of blackness and swirling winds.

"Hey, I liked that mug," I said.

She whirled on me and I thought she'd slap me. She was flushed and her hands were tight fists and I could feel magic roil in her. Some very stupid part of me was drawn to that roil of power like a moth to flame. I wanted to know what she could do, I wanted to stand in the eye of the hurricane that I could feel building in her and watch it destroy the world around us. I wanted to push my own magic up against it and see if they would fit together like two pieces of the same whole.

"Fine, if you need to you can throw this one too," I held out my cup.

She took it and threw it at the wall behind my head where it shattered into a rain of tiny shards. Tea splattered my back and I grimaced as I stepped around the spray on the floor so it didn't get on my shoes. She'd thrown it hard enough that it was almost dust where the pieces landed on my shoulders. I brushed them off and we watched each other.

"You're stronger than you look," I said.

"He's never going to tell me anything is he?" she said as though I hadn't said anything at all.

"He's Tamlin," I said which wasn't really an answer.

"He's the High Lord and as his wife, it's my task to produce an heir," she said in a soft voice.

"He's your husband, not your keeper," I said and managed not to choke on any of the words.

"Isn't he?"

"Is that what you want him to be?"

"It's too late for that question now."

"We're immortal, all we have is time. It's never too late, Feyre."

I felt an echo of her revulsion down the bond, a memory of that sensation of magic and violation and everything that went with it. These were people she loved who had made choices on her behalf that they didn't have a right to consult on. It wasn't just the magic that left her trembling but the magic made it worse, the damiana pushed the emotion into a physical sensation that I felt along with her as it rushed through her.

It wasn't a surprise when she screamed. Not with pain. With a rage that shot out of her and through me. She collapsed to her knees again and I knelt beside her without considering whether or not it was a good idea. She was shaking and held the silk of my jacket in a white knuckled grip and kept it close to her body. I reached out like she would accept it if I offered her comfort and hesitated with my hand floating above her shoulder.

I didn't pull her closer. That would have been unforgivable.

Instead I reached for the tangled mess of her hair and started pulling out pins and little crumpled bits of flowers. I barely touched her hair as I picked them out by hand. Magic would have been faster but I didn't want it to be fast. I carefully touched her as little as I could as I unwound curls and a piece of ribbon so the soft brown strands fell around her face and shoulders, lying against the black of the jacket and tickling my palms as I reached for another sprig of flowers caught in an errant curl.

She exhaled and I didn't look at her face. I could feel her attention on me and if I looked at her, I was sure that everything would be written on my face. The draught she had taken was calling for me. I could feel it through our bond but I didn't think she understood it yet. She was calming because the magic had fought Tamlin but it wasn't going to fight me. Someone else's nearness, anyone else's nearness would spark that same sense of revulsion that had left her pouring horror down the bond on her wedding night.

But she was my mate and I was hers.

I'd worked so hard to keep that thought from crossing my mind and now that it was in, it ran circles around everything else. I picked out pin after pin and dropped them into a neat pile on the floor beside us and didn't look at her, didn't think about the way she smelled or that I could smell Tamlin on her.

I didn't realize that she had leaned forward until her voice came from just below my ear, "He's going to be so angry."

"He does get a bit testy at times."

"Is all this just to piss him off?"

"This is about you."

That was too honest. I'd gotten just about everything out of her long hair but it was still tangled and I was falling into the soft rightness of having her this close. I was about to start running my fingers through her hair to smooth out the snarls and that was not going to make anything better tomorrow when she woke up with the drug and the anger out of her system and remembered how much she hated me.

I put on a sarcastic smile and started to sit back but she was watching me and I got caught in her eyes.

Fuck.

I needed more space if I was going to keep any semblance of my sanity or who I was supposed to be intact.

"I'm glad to have left. I thought it was going to kill me. I don't care why you did it. I don't care if this is all part of some elaborate game you're playing. I don't care," she said.

"You will when the drugs all pass, you always liked me just fine when you drunk too," I said because I couldn't figure out how to force myself to back away when I could feel the warmth of her body so close to me. If I couldn't have physical space, there were other ways to push her back.

She glared at me with something like disgust on her face. She drew away from me and that little bit of distance between us was enough of a reprieve for me to get to my feet and walk away.

I paused halfway across the room and told her where to find her bedroom on the floor below us.

Staying there was a risk I couldn't take. She was Feyre but she was also Tamlin's wife and who I was when I was with her needed to be someone she could report on without ruining centuries of carefully constructed reputation. I winnowed out of the hall and opened my eyes on my bedroom in the townhouse in Velaris. It was about as far from her as I could be and even still I was almost painfully aware of how much calmer she was after being close to me.

I could have chased that moment of calm to the ends of the earth if I could have been sure she wanted to be there with me.

* * *

Part 2: Bargains and Promises

* * *

I was back in the palace for breakfast. Shielded as tightly as I could be shielded but that didn't always keep her out. Right now, for at least this moment, I was safe and alone in my own head. She was brushed and washed and wearing a heavy sweater over Night Court trousers. It was a strangely domestic look. Magenta slippers and soft billowing trousers gathered at the ankles and then white wool that was too big for her over that. Her hair was braided and simple. Still, she looked pale and drawn and thin.

"Eat," I said nudging a plate towards her.

I did not ask her if she had been able to sleep. I suspected the answer was no.

She shoveled food onto her plate and started eating without argument. Halfway through her second serving curiosity seemed to get the better of her and she held up her tattooed hand so the eye faced me. I looked up at her from my coffee and started to talk about the bond and the shields and I was suggesting she needed to train if she expected to keep control over her own mind when Mor sauntered into the room.

We both fell silent.

"What are you doing here?" I asked in as conversational a tone as I could manage. What she was doing here was snooping for answers about why I'd run out on Cass and Az the night before. Her eyes barely widened when she saw Feyre and even that much was a testament to how shocked she was. Morrigan could probably sit in the Court of Nightmares while entire families were murdered without blinking if she had to.

"I do believe your words to me were, 'Beloved cousin you may use this palace as your own home whenever you might need it,'" she said dropping into one of the extra seats at the table and considering the food that Feyre hadn't managed to eat yet.

"I don't think I've ever referred to you as beloved anything," I said.

"I know but I can hear it in the words you speak, ever since we were tiny children and you used to call me little brat, I could hear that you truly meant, 'Most beloved cousin, sister to my heart,'" Mor said with a flourish of her fork before she speared a tomato and ate it with a smile.

"Delightful," I said.

I made introductions and went back to paying too much attention to my coffee. I could barely manage to keep myself on an even keel with Feyre in the room and now Morrigan was going to chatter and make friends and I'd have to manage to keep that conversation going without slipping too far out of character. She was going back to Tamlin eventually and there were risks I probably should not be taking with her.

I was deep in my own musings on that question, when the revulsion hit me. I had been thinking on how much I could trust her and whether I needed to address her as I would any member of a hostile court and suddenly the nausea from the night before was back in full force. She was in well past my shields like she'd always been well past my shields and I just hadn't noticed until her side of the bond was roiling.

Mor had reached over and patted her hand as part of some conversation they'd been having about me and my brooding. I glared at Mor and she flipped me a rude gesture but she did it with the hand that had been on Feyre and once the touch was gone, the magic calmed. So she hadn't slept it off entirely then.

Blessedly, Mor hadn't noticed. It wasn't the kind of magic you could feel in the air, it was the kind of magic that ran deep. Feyre and I were the only ones affected.

"Are you done?" I asked with a nod at her plate.

"Yeah," she said, her eyes darted between Mor and myself and I could almost hear the pieces clinking into place and I was not having this conversation over half eaten toast while Mor watched.

"Come along then," I said.

I stood and gestured for her to lead the way out of the room. Mor pouted a bit at being left but I shot her a look before she could say anything, not the joking glares but a significant look that I trusted her to understand. Mor considered me as Feyre stood and then gave an elegant little shrug and went back to her food without complaint.

I took Feyre to the library and leaned against a table as she took in the space and the shelves. She couldn't read. I'd forgotten that. Maybe if she would still look at me after this conversation, I could help her learn. I had told her once that it would be her own private torture but maybe it wouldn't have to be. I was well ahead of myself. I was acting like an idiot school boy with a crush, mooning around and falling into daydreams.

I almost let it go.

"It would appear the drug hasn't worn off yet," I said.

"No," she said.

She stood well back from me. I had thought she was just wandering to look at the shelves and the collection and to catch a glimpse of the mountains in the morning sun beyond the open pillars but perhaps she had been putting the heavy oak table between us to buy her some space. I flopped down in a chair and pushed it back so I could cross my ankles and rest them on the polished wood.

I will not come and get you is what I wanted the position to say. Look how comfortable I am right here.

She had tucked her hands up in the sweater. It wasn't cold in the room but maybe some side effect was making her chill. I wasn't sure if there was a way to adjust the warming spells that held back the elements in this place. I could probably figure it out. Later. I would fuss with the magic later. I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.

"You're a conniving bastard who treats life and death like a game," she said.

That pulled me back out of the daydreams and I gave her a toothy smile in response. "Am I?"

"Everything you do has some ulterior motive that only makes sense to you."

"Possibly but there is a reason for everything I do."

"I want to go home."

"Bargains are bargains and neither of us can alter them once they have been made. A week and then back there."

"So break the bargain."

"No."

"Why?"

Her words had bite to them. I swung my feet off the table and leaned forward on my elbows to consider her.

I would not break the bargain because once I did there would be no one else with the power or the position to pull her out the Spring Court ever again. Even leaving on her own would be nearly impossible now that they were married. If another Court found a High Lord's wife running around in their territory it could be considered an act of war not to pack her up in a box with a bow and ship her home or at the very least invite the High Lord in question to come collect her himself. I could not send her back to that place without being sure she didn't need the escape route. They had drugged her and tried to force magic that shouldn't be played with. She wasn't over the effects of it. I let the anger hit me in full force and I knew it showed in my eyes even if my expression was carefully neutral. She straightened a bit but didn't pull back, didn't let my rage cow her own.

"Good. Be angry. Take all that rage back to that place you call home and remember it the next time the simpering priestess starts trying to fill you with drugs and babies," I said pushing up so I was leaning on the table, leaning towards her.

"It is my home. He is my husband and that is where I want to be," every word dripped with venom.

"A week isn't so long," I said flopping back into my chair. My anger wasn't gone but something about knowing she was willing to fight me on this made me feel better about the possibility that she would fight him on the next idiot plan he came up with for his new perfect doll of wife. "You should probably start learning how to shield properly. You're emotions are getting all over me. You're like a muddy dog except its resentment and ire you're shaking onto my furniture."

"Prick," she said.

I bullied her into a lesson on using her shields but even that was too much to stomach for long when the drug in her system was still rubbing gently against the bond. It was a little like a skittish cat. It would vanish and then appear to rub along my shields when I wasn't expecting it. I finally gave up and retreated with a lie about needing to attend to important matters and winnowed away from her just to catch my breath.

I stayed away for two days. I left her little notes about raising and lowering her shields and indulged myself in checking in on how that was going. I left her sentences to read and things to copy and I had no idea if she did that but reading wasn't as important as being able to protect herself. I took time in the middle of days, away from debating training exercises for the armies with Cassian and new details from the other courts that Azriel's spies had found. I took little breaks to just sit in my room and keep one tendril of attention on that bond as she sealed and reopened her shields. She was good at it. Natural talent and each time it went down and went back up that talent started to become skill.

I was back in the palace for breakfast on the morning of the fourth day of her week and she sat down with me and said, "Any menial tasks for today?"

"Good morning Feyre," I said.

That set off an argument about manners that was inane but I needed her to fight me because she'd been getting so quiet these last few days and the idea of her becoming the person Ianthe wanted her to be turned my stomach. Tamlin might have thought she was happier all wrapped up in gauze and silk but he was an idiot. An idiot who loved her and hadn't seemed to have noticed who she was. Ianthe wasn't an idiot and everything Ianthe did had some rationale behind it and Feyre wasn't going to make it through sharing a Court with that snake of a Priestess if she wasn't prepared to fight back.

Feyre kicked me in the shin when I told her I wanted to be treated like a person before I would answer any of her questions. I wasn't even sure at this point in the argument if I cared if she said good morning or asked me how my day was. It was an argument for the sake of an argument.

"I would have expected better than school yard squabbling from you," I said.

"You're the one behaving like a child, passing notes and disappearing rather than having a reasonable conversation or answering a question."

She kicked at me again and I reached under the table to grab her foot by the ankle and she went still. Her expression was still angry but her eyes were steady. I dropped her foot, I'd been able to feel the skin between the cuff of her pants and her slipper and I couldn't touch her for long without losing my composure.

If arguing wasn't going to be a good enough defense then I would distract myself by testing she had learned. I pushed her shields. I cajoled her back to the library and had her read things for me. She was hostile but far better than I'd expected. She pulled a pen out of my hand and carefully copied out the sentence I'd written for her in uneven but perfectly legible script. Her annoyance peaked through her failing shields and that bought me another half hour of drilling her on keeping the defenses in place.

I convinced her to join me for dinner and once that meal was over, I was out of reasons to force my company on her.

I dropped onto a settee in a little nooks that lined the main room where we had had our meal and used magic to pull a stack of reports off my desk in Velaris. I settled down and started to read. I expected her to vanish into her rooms and avoid me but instead she took the other chair in the little alcove and sat with her own book even though reading it was frustrating and slow going for her and she refused to sound out words aloud or let me see her struggle with it.

I looked up over the pages from Azriel's spies in the Dawn Court to catch her watching me. Over the next half hour, I caught that same look more than once and the frustration of her reading faded as she gave up on it and just held the book as a prop.

"Is there something you needed to say?" I asked.

"I used to believe the myth that faeries can't lie," she said.

"Mmm?" I said shuffling my papers but not actually looking back at them. That was not anything I had expected her to say.

"I know that's not true, you're proof enough of that but I was wondering if you were capable of keeping a promise," she said.

"I don't tell you things, that's not quite the same as lying, Feyre Darling but yes, I am capable of keeping a promise," I said.

"I'm going to ask you for something and I want you to swear to me, swear on something that matters to you, that you won't hold it against me. No sneering, no bringing it up later, even if you refuse, swear to me that you won't turn this into some pawn in this game."

"I'll consider it," I said and as disinterested as my voice was, my heart was in my throat.

"Yes, I can that promise," I said after a long pause in which I ran as many options as I could think of that would end with this in some way becoming something I regretted. Even if she gave me some secret that was the key to preventing the impending war, I wasn't promising not to tell other people, just not to use it to further upset her or her tenuous marriage.

She waited.

"Whatever you say next, it will be as though I never heard it, I will not repeat it back to you nor to Tamlin," I said, "I swear it upon the city where I spent my childhood, upon my wings and the night sky they carry me through."

I smirked at the end but I meant every word. Cauldron boil me, mother save me but I meant every word. If this is what she wanted, I would give it to her.

"Can I touch you?"

I stared at her. I think I forgot how to breathe for a moment. I was too still and too quiet and too suspicious for a little too long. She swung forward so she sat on the edge of the chair, she'd been sitting with her feet tucked up under her and she held the book between both hands and bounced it a little as she tried to figure out where to start speaking. She was still wrapped in wool, a shawl today, not the sweater but the heavy blue wool brought out her eyes and she still looked like something that belonged to curling up on quiet intimate winter mornings.

"Do you know when a fire has burned down to the embers and it isn't as bright as the flames but it burns with a fiercer heat before it dies?" she didn't wait for me to answer and kept talking, "The drug is like that. I can feel it fading. I can't touch anyone but it keeps burning in me, this desire for that touch. You're the only one that doesn't make me want to vomit when they get close. I don't know what it is, I don't know what magic or shield you have that Nuala doesn't and Mor doesn't and I don't care. I just need a minute of relief," she said.

I held her gaze.

She knew.

She had to know. She had to know the exact reason that in spite of the drug that made everyone else feel like an invading army against her body and soul, I was immune. She wasn't ready to say it but I could see it in her eyes. She didn't want to know but desire for the truth had never made a difference. The truth was with or without our desire for it. I didn't say anything but the way her gaze skated away and then back again and the tiniest smile that I allowed were enough confirmation.

"The drugs will pass soon enough but for now, if that's what you need, then yes," I said.

She held out her tattooed hand to me. An offering across the empty space between us that had felt unbreachable only a moment before. I extended mine and waited for her to be the one to take it and watched her swallow hard when she did. Her fingers were cold and limp in mine.

"Is the chill as bad as it seems?" I asked.

"Sometimes," she said.

She didn't look at me. There was a small table between the two chairs and our hands linked over it. She was looking towards the nearest window as though she needed to be sure that the world was still out there. I readjusted my hold, closing my fingers more completely around hers. The swirl of dark ink over her skin was both familiar and a little strange. The marks were the tattoos of my childhood but not used the way those ones had been. It was a tenuous bit of contact and I wanted her closer but that wasn't a demand I could make.

She laced her fingers with mine and I held so still, I stopped breathing. There's a moment on the battlefield where the real world no longer exists, where your existences narrows down to blades and your body and your magic and there is nothing else until the fighting clears. A strange narrow clarity brought on by adrenaline and survival instincts. This was the closest I had ever felt to that moment without my life being in immediate danger.

"Don't say a word," she said.

I held my hand up and made a show of laying a finger against my lips. The smile I gave her was a challenge and a defense mechanism all at once. She twisted her own lips into something that wasn't really a smile and I waited. This was killing me. She hated me a little bit and I could feel it. Her shields were down again and I could feel how much she hated asking me for this.

I sat up a little more and dumped the reports on the table. If she had been playing me, she could read them and run off home with Azriel's newly collected secrets but she didn't even glance down. Her eyes were on mine. I started to open my mouth, I wasn't even sure what I wanted to say but she shook her head and I closed it again. She let out a breath and closed her eyes.

I tugged on her hand.

I wanted a response. I wanted her to say something. Instead she got up and skirted around the table to stand in front of me without dropping my hand. My other hand came up off my knee of its own accord but stopped shy of touching her. She kept her eyes on me and I didn't dare look away.

There were faeries in the depths of the forests who could only be held in place if you could keep them in view. She was not one of them but I had that same sense of impermanence as I looked at her. She was going to vanish if I wasn't careful.

This moment would pass and it would not come back.

The moment did pass and instead of vanishing, she sat down beside me. Her knee, her elbow, and a moment later her shoulder touched mine. Lined up. Sitting neat and straight and formal and not looking at each other. I broke first, I turned into her. I looked at the side of her face, the sharp angle of her cheek bone, the hollow below her eyes, the fullness in her lips that even her thinness hadn't stolen. Her hair was silk.

"Feyre," I said.

"Don't talk," she said.

"Tell me that you'll return that promise. That you won't hold this against me."

She looked at me but we were so close that she faltered and looked away but she nodded. I leaned into her so that I could rest my forehead against her temple. I felt her tense and her fingers tightened on mine but she didn't pull away.

She knew.

She knew.

She knew.

She knew and she wasn't pushing me away, not yet. My nose grazed her cheek and still she didn't pull away. I could smell her. I could categorize the details of that scent slowly and carefully and file them away in my memory. I tried not to think the word but the smell of her and the nearness of her was pushing against instincts that ran deeper than my conscious thoughts.

Mine.

No.

Not mine.

Not mine.

Stop.

She smelled like home and safety and all the things I had ever wanted but she was not mine.

When she did pull back, I stayed silent and braced myself for her to leave. Instead she readjusted so that her head rested on my shoulder I could feel her breathing on my neck. I twisted into her and she moved with me. I braced my shoulders against the corner of the settee and she settled in against my chest. Warm and so thin that she felt fragile. She hadn't let go of my hand and her hair brushed my cheek and I stared up at the ceiling and breathed slowly.

Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

Please.

I pushed those thoughts out. Things done made under the effects of drugs and isolation and desperation did not bear consideration. She relaxed by degrees and it took a very very long time. I rubbed the knuckles of the hand she had entwined with mine but didn't offer anything else. She wrapped an arm around my back, slipping it between my jacket and my shirt as she relaxed a little more. She was half asleep and so close. I could feel her drifting in that space between waking and sleep.

"You're safe here, I swear that to you, you're safe here," I said into her hair but she was already drifting away into sleep.

I woke up with the heavy weight of another person against my body . I could feel her heart beating against my chest. Her hair brushed my cheek and she'd cuddled into the space between my body and the back of the settee. I had braced one of my feet on the floor without waking so that I hadn't been rolled out onto the floor. She was all I could smell. My body hadn't been this relaxed since long long before Amarantha had returned to these shores, maybe since before the war.

The chill had gone out of her. Her fingers were curled on my chest and I traced the line of one from where the nail polish that had probably matched her wedding dress had started to chip and up over the back of her hand to the cuff of her shirt. Her fingers shifted at the feather light touch and I did it again, tracing each finger just to feel her skin and the way the bones fit together. Her entire body was a miracle.

I was smiling. A stupid vapid smile that I couldn't quite convince myself to abandon while she slept so close to me. She stirred and I couldn't see more than the top of her head but that she didn't move told me she hadn't woken yet. I smoothed the edges of the shawl down over her shoulder and untangled the little tassels along the edge so they lay in neat little lines.

My rational mind finally beat back enough of the grinning idiot for me to ease her carefully off my shoulder and lay her down on the settee. Her eyes were shut and I smoothed a bit of hair back from her forehead and just watched her sleep for another moment.

Then I stood up and winnowed away before she could wake up and blink up at me and I would have to watch that soft sleepy drug-assisted comfort that we were sharing turn into horror and fear when she realized it was me. My more rational mind gave one concession to the primal thing that I could never entirely escape. I left my jacket wrapped around her not because I feared she would be cold but because I wanted her to wake up to the smell of me. I left her alone but I wanted her to wake and remember that I had been there.

* * *

Chapter 3: Revelations and Offers

* * *

Feyre avoided me for the rest of her stay. She refused to open her door when I tried to bully her into a reading lesson. She did not join me for meals. The twins reported that she was eating well and that the last effects of the drugs seemed to have worn off and that when I was away from the palace, she explored the nooks and the library and spent time staring at the giant map of Prythian. She was doing well, they told me, she was just doing well as far away from me as she could manage to be without jumping out a window.

The morning I took her home, she appeared at the breakfast table early and didn't sit down. It was the first I'd seen her since I'd tucked her in and left her sleeping on the settee.

"Good morning," she said in a tone that somehow made the pleasantry sound like something vulgar.

"Good morning," I said as sweetly as I could manage while I looked her over. She was dressed in the same pink gown she had arrived in. The sweaters and shawls were gone, the hollows were still there under her eyes but they weren't as purple and she didn't look as thin or as haggard. Nothing was coming through the bond. She had slammed those new shields down against me and was doing a marvelous job. I slid my power over the edges and she pushed back against it and glared.

"I want to go home," she said.

"Do you really?" I asked.

"Of course I do."

"Tea before you go?"

"No, this is the end of the week, you have to take me back."

"I am not suggesting otherwise. I was really just hoping to distract you long enough to finish my scone."

"The scone can wait."

I took another bite just to make her glare at me. If I were being honest, I did it to stretch out these last moments before she was gone for a month. I put down the half eaten pastry and stood. There was something in her eyes that set me on edge. The intensity in those eyes wasn't friendly but also wasn't as hostile as the looks she usually saved for me. I held her gaze as I walked towards her and she startled a little bit when I took her hand as though she hadn't realized that I was getting closer.

I let myself indulge just a little in running a thumb along her knuckles before I folded her hand over my arm and then winnowed us away to the Spring Court. The place she wanted to be. The place where they left her to vomit up her dinner after her nightmares and thought filling her with powerful fertility drugs was a fitting wedding gift. They were idiots and she deserved better but it wasn't my place to force that decision on her.

"Don't say anything to make it worse," she said to me as we appeared on the ground outside the manor.

I held her gaze as I put my finger against my mouth as I had done before. She narrowed her eyes at me and I found myself wondering where that fell on my previous promise not to bring up that night again. I was unfortunately saved from that debate by the appearance of Tamlin on the front steps of the manor. I dropped my hand and Feyre looked at me for another moment and then turned for him.

Tamlin was predictably dull in his anger and his threats. He could at least have found something creative to threaten me with but it was all vague and angry.

"Until next month, do send along a message if you need anything," I said to Feyre and tapped the back of her hand with my finger before smiling at them both like this was a dinner party and I was terribly bored and then I left.

I left her in the viper pit of the Spring Court and tried not to think about it for the vast majority of the next month. Her shields were good but she was quiet even when they faltered. The flash of fear and the image of paint splattered on a torn up room nearly broke my resolve to stay out of it but the fear didn't last. I reached for her sometimes and ran my power down the very edges her shields so lightly that I was sure she couldn't feel me and then retreated.

Life was busy enough to keep her out of my every waking thought.

The Court of Nightmares had been neglected too long and I had to make a series of visits to tighten the leash. There were rebuilding efforts to keep an eye on. There were regions in the south west corners of the territory where a little band of Warlords was all but begging to have the army sent after them. There were rogue Illyrians and the loyal Illyrians and some days I wasn't sure which group was the more infuriating. There were long debates with Amren and Mor about Hybern and the allegiances of the other courts. There were long debates with Cassian about recruitment and whether or not we risked sparking fear if we pushed for it early. There were long nights with Azriel's reports.

I woke up one morning to realize I had just days before I would see her again.

I wanted as much of the coming week to be mine to spend how I saw fit as could be managed. Meetings were rescheduled and tours through the south tweaked until I could comfortably ignore everything for seven days. Mor gave me a knowing smile as I shot down her suggestion of a Court of Nightmares visit that would have fallen on the third day that Feyre would be in the palace.

"Fuck off," I said.

"I said nothing!" she said.

"You said nothing very loudly."

"Poor cranky High Lord."

"I was thinking of giving you the Spring Court after I killed Tamlin as a gift but I think it might be worth it to get rid of you."

"It's nice to know you care now are you going to sign this for Kier or should I just forge it for you?"

After the weeks had run out, the night before I went to the Spring Court, I did not sleep well. I had been fine, not happy but fine, for the three months in which I didn't see her and convinced myself I never would again. Having a date to count down to made it all so much harder to manage. I would see her and she would hate me and I would try very hard to find ways to convince her not to while not giving away secrets that I didn't want Tamlin to know.

I winnowed into the Spring Court early that morning.

If she was going to interrupt my breakfast to be sent home at the crack of dawn, then I would return the favour. I found myself waiting in the hall outside their bedroom while they argued behind the closed door. Feyre was thinner than she had been when I'd left her and she didn't argue about being taken nearly as much as I had expected. Tamlin did. Of course Tamlin did. I didn't give him time to finish talking before I was pulling Feyre away.

She didn't look at me at all. She watched Tamlin until we were out of sight and then she stared at the view when we arrived in the palace. I, on the other hand, watched her so carefully that I nearly jumped when we rounded the corner to find Cassian standing on the rail of the balcony by the breakfast table. His wings were out and he bristled with weapons like something out of a battlefield nightmare. I suppose that was the point of that costume. He should have been in the halls below us providing back up for Mor should she require it.

Keeping my reaction to raised eyebrows was a result of years of practice at managing my expressions. Something was very wrong if he was here, today, dressed like that.

"Cassian," I said.

"Kier has been having -" he started hopping off the banister and tucking his wings in and then he saw Feyre and his eyes snapped to me. He had genuinely forgotten. He could remember troop movements and supply line layouts for three armies with such accuracy that he knew where the field hospitals were without even checking a map and he had forgotten that I had told them all to be far away today.

My alarm shifted into annoyance. Not so bad then.

I crossed my arms and tilted my head to the side. From a distance, he probably looked like the greater threat in the room but I let enough power trickle out that he at least would be aware that he wasn't and that I was as pissed as I looked. His own expression showed just a flicker of a hastily suppressed, "Oh shit," that would have been funny if I hadn't been so worried about Feyre's quiet thinness beside me.

"Cassian, is the Hewn City about to fall in on itself?"

"Nope."

"Have more than five people died?"

Cass cracked a smile, "Not yet."

"Then I trust your judgment, deal with it."

"You don't mind if I take one of these, do you?" he said and didn't wait for an answer to pick up a muffin off the table and sauntered towards us. The low flat voice I was using would have sent most people scurrying away but Cassian flashed me a smile and then flashed Feyre one as well and then stuffed the entire muffin into his mouth and kept going. He wasn't going to scurry off like he was afraid of me but he also wasn't going to push his luck.

"Who was that?" Feyre asked before he was out of sight.

"An obnoxious bastard," I said loudly enough that Cassian waved his middle finger at me over his shoulder before he rounded the corner and headed for the stairs and back down to bring Keir's problems back into line. I was going to have to make an appearance and hurt people in the next few weeks, maybe the next few days and the prospect of it was a little exhausting.

"Do any of your subjects treat you with respect?" she asked still staring at the space where Cassian had been.

"All my subjects treat me with either proper respect or enough fear to approximate respect closely enough to be tolerable. Cassian and Morrigan have been my friends longer than I have been High Lord, their behaviour predates such classification as subjects. Muffin?" I said helping myself to a seat and pushing away concerns about the Court of Nightmares. I meant it. I trusted their judgment. If I went down there later to find that they had killed half the court, well, that wouldn't necessarily be a loss to the world or my conscience.

She sat down across from me. She had worn blue and while I bristled a little at having her in Spring Court styles, the colour suited her. There was not a single glance in my direction. Her attention was on the food or the drapery or the hallway in case Cassian or someone else wearing half an armoury decided to saunter through the door.

I prodded at her shields, prodded for answers about whatever Tamlin had done to scare her so badly earlier in the month. I prodded and prodded and she did not once turn her face toward me even as she slammed impressive shields down against me and flipped me that same rude gesture Cassian had used instead of giving me the answers I was prying for.

When the meal was done, while I sat with my tea and a lull in all the prodding, she finally turned to me.

"You're my mate," she said in an even, unaffected voice.

I put down the tea cup.

Her eyes were on me, huge and bright in her narrow face and she kept talking like she was discussing a change in the weather, "You've known since the balcony after Amarantha. That's why you looked at me like that."

I held her gaze. She had rehearsed this, had done her research and figured out exactly what she wanted to say and then practiced how to say it. That she was powerful, I suspected. That she was brave, I knew. That there was a politician in there as well was a pleasant surprise even if I was her target. I settled back into my chair and picked back up my cup. If we were going to have this conversation, we were going to have this conversation properly. I had been expecting this even if I wasn't ready for it and probably never would be.

"I had suspicions before that but yes, that was when it was clearest," I said.

"You weren't going to mention it?"

"I hadn't planned on it, no."

"Why?"

"Because I am busy and you are married and it would have complicated things that were better left simple," was not the entire truth.

"It is a sacred gift, a blessing from the Cauldron."

"Is something a priestess would say and probably did."

"It is almost exactly what you said the last time I was here."

Fuck.

"Do you want to be my mate, Feyre? Do you want me to invoke the ancient laws that hold a mating bond as sacred above all else? We could have your marriage nullified before dinner if that's what you wanted."

Her even carefully planned little speech wavered at that. The silence stretched as I kept my body language carefully relaxed and her eyes darted over me trying to make sense of it. I wondered what it was that she did want because her expression told me that it was not anything to do with me. Why bring it up at all if she hated the idea so much?

"What do you want? To ignore it and hope it goes away?" she asked.

"It will not 'go away' but yes, my original plan was to ignore it and ignore you and to get on with my life. You have made your choices. I have no interest in coercing you into accepting the bond. I do not want your servitude or your deference or whatever other words the old dusty books you've been reading suggested are the proper behaviour for a female when she meets her mate. I meant it when I said that war is coming. I meant it when I said I wanted your help. You are married and you love him enough that you walked into hell for him. I'm not interested in ruining that. I do not need a mate, I need an ally," I said.

"An ally," she repeated.

"When the Mother reaches out and points out your mate to you, she is telling you that you have found an equal, someone who is capable of reflecting back to you your greatest strengths, who is capable of making you better and stronger than you are. And I am the most powerful High Lord that Prythian has ever seen which means that you, to be my mate, you could be something just as powerful," all of which was true enough if incomplete.

"The mating bond comes with all the most primal urges of the High Fae to protect and defend and fuck but we are not animals, Feyre. A bond is not a guarantee of anything. The stories the bards will sing and the poets will write would have you believe otherwise but it doesn't make the bond anything but a glorified urge," I said.

She raised her eyebrows at me as though she was going to call me on my lies so I just kept talking.

"My parents were a mated pair," I said. "They were in love at one point or so the stories go but it didn't last. Eventually it was the children and the expectations of the court that held them together and little else. There is magic in a mating bond but it is a suggestion from fate. It is not destiny. You have to make something of it yourself."

"So you don't care?" she asked.

"That isn't quite what I said," I told her, "If you'd like to play with primal urges, I can think of a few interesting things to try."

"You're a pig."

"Would you prefer that I read you love poems?"

"I would prefer to understand the games you're playing."

"And therein lies the entire problem," I said. "We're all playing bigger games than this. I have Illyrian war bands in the northern corners of my territory to bring back into line. I have an impending war with Hybern to worry about and apparently the Steward of the Hewn City just fucked up badly enough that Cassian thought I should come and deal with it personally. These things need to come first."

I sighed. This is not what I wanted to say to her but it didn't make it less true.

"I am not playing games with the mating bond and I will not. Before you get concerned, I have no interest in Tamlin ever being aware of it. When they write the stories of us, our chapter will not be the love story."

"You're really not going to use it against us?" she said.

Us.

"No, I'm not. Consider joining this war as a weapon under your own power and not a trophy for Tamlin's collection. That offer of being my ally stands. But," I held up a finger and waited until she was looking at me.

"What?" she said.

"Fate and Cauldron and primal urges can all be damned, I am not offering myself as your mate or anyone else's. Now if you'll excuse me. I need to go and see what Kier has done downstairs. Enjoy your stay here," I said.

Then I got up and walked away from her.

The thing we hadn't said, either of us, the truth that should have mattered most in that conversation beat in my head with every step. My parents and others across the centuries all stood as testaments to this truth: a mating bond on its own is not love.

I didn't come back to see her until it was time to take her home and we didn't speak of it.

Love was more than fate. Love was a choice. She had made it clear that she had not and would not choose me and if I couldn't have that then I wasn't willing to consider the rest of it.

Notes:

From here the story progresses much as it does in canon.

I have no intention of writing out those scenes because very little changes. Rhys keeps his secrets and she does not bring the bond up again after he so thoroughly shuts it down. Knowing matters little when they don't have the trust or shared emotion to back it up yet. He doesn't tell her the significance of the ring she takes from the Weaver, she is still surprised by the force of her jealousy when they visit the Summer Court, their little show in the Court of Nightmares has a mildly different tone because she writes a lot of her reaction off to "primal urges" but it doesn't really change what happens though his declaration afterward that he will protect her even if she hates him for it carries slightly more weight.

* * *

Chapter 4: Epilogue: Starfall and Hope

* * *

I had been avoiding her. I could admit that at least to myself and now here she was, radiant and shimmering as she watched the stars rain down above us. Now that we were here together, I let myself stare a little. It had only been a few days and I had missed her.

The problem with our little show in the Court of Nightmares, with the way she had slipped into place in Velaris and among the Inner Circle was that it gave birth to hope. Hope was a dangerous thing. Hope was for people who could believe that their futures were waiting for them. I was not one of those people. Every sliver of good I had ever found in my life had to be carved out of the present or excavated from the past. The future had never been something to trust.

I hadn't realized how much hope I'd been letting myself entertain until she was spitting venom by the side of that lake but that felt far away now that we were here.

She did not shy away as we watched the sky and the hope I'd spent the days I'd avoided her breaking down started to pull itself back together. She stood beside me and asked if I had been avoiding her as punishment for those things she had said after we'd left the Court of Nightmares. I turned to her, away from the glorious rain of light in the sky above us. I could just barely see the flashes of light reflected in her eyes.

"I said some horrible things, too," I murmured.

"I didn't mean it. I meant it more about myself than you. And I'm sorry."

"You were right though," I said. "I stayed away because you were right. Though I'm glad to hear my absence felt like a punishment."

She looked at me and I was sure she was going to say something else but then she turned back to the sky. I watched her as closely as I dared. Her attention strayed to the dancers and I leaned on the rail and looked down at the people below us, at the important members of the merchant classes who had jockeyed for these invites and the city officials who had issued them, at Mor and Cassian and Azriel and the few other people I had invited myself.

It seemed like a message that maybe hope was't such an empty thing. After all, I had long ago given up the hope that I would see this place again, see this sky again, see these people again and I was here.

"I was right," she said.

I looked back to her and something in my stomach lurched at the words. This is what happened when I let hopes in, hope was a fragile thing that was so very easy to kill.

"There's something broken in you, broken and healing, just as there's something in me that I had thought was damaged beyond all repair but seems to be healing as well. It's slow but it is happening. I said those things because there's something in you that reflects pieces of me and I don't always want to see those pieces with such clarity. You said once, it feels like so long ago but you said once that that's what the mating bond means. An equal, someone who reflects back your strengths," she said.

Maybe it was early to be killing hopes.

"The poets never mention all the insecurities that get reflected along with it," I said.

She snorted at that and her eyes drifted out to the view again then back to me as her face went serious again.

"I know it's not something you are willing to offer or something that you want but I want you to know that regardless, I am proud to be your mate. Even if it isn't, if it can't be," she faltered and waved her hand and I understood what she meant and nearly stopped breathing to realize that that was how she remembered that conversation, "I am proud that the Cauldron would consider me your equal. You are not and have never been a hateful coward and I am sorry that I said it."

The hope roared in my ears. It was still fragile but it was so loud.

"Feyre," I started.

Before I could make any grand statements, something hit her in the side of the face and she screamed and wheeled back. I let out a bark of laughter. She wiped it away from her eyes and looked up at me with her mouth agape. I laughed harder as she sputtered and blinked against the splatter of yellow green star spirit across her face. We were high enough here to be in their path and there had been years where half the party went home speckled in glowing dust.

"I could have been blinded," she said indignant.

"Don't" I said taking her hands before she could wipe it off, "It looks like your freckles are glowing."

She reached out to shove me and I stepped out of her way and into the path of another one of them. It splattered across the side of my head and I swore in surprise. She was laughing now. I had thought once that she was beautiful but I had never seen her laugh. I hadn't known what kind of beauty she was truly capable of until she was grinning at me like that.

I stepped towards her like the smile was something I would be able to feel on my skin if I was close enough.

"I am proud to be your mate, Feyre. I am proud that whatever it is that makes these decisions, fate or Cauldron or primal urges," she snickered at that and I smiled back, "Whatever it is, I am honoured that it thinks I could ever be worthy of the person you are."

She went still and the grin was fading but her eyes were brighter than every fleck of light on her skin.

"I told you once that I was not on offer and that I would not have the mating bond used as a play thing in a tug of war across the Courts. It is a gift. It is not a bargaining chip," I said.

"A gift," she repeated.

"When I told you that I had had suspicions of the mating bond before that moment of clarity on the balcony after," another hand wave and a smirk, "I may have been downplaying it just a little bit."

"So tell me the parts of the story you left out."

So I told her all of it.

Against the backdrop of music and dancing and the wide open sky full of falling stars, in this place where the people I loved most were safe, so much of that story seemed impossible. Torture and death, fifty years without wings or sky or hope, the years before that of war and pain and so much suffering. It felt like it couldn't be quite real or maybe it felt like it couldn't be quite true that the world was big enough to contain it all. All the horror and all the beauty. The death and the joy. It all coexisted in a tangled mess.

When I told her that I had seen her painting flowers, that I had pushed back the image of the night sky, the same night sky we were looking at now, her face was so still and her eyes shone with tears. I told her the rest of the story while she watched me with those shining eyes.

"If you were going to die, then I would die with you," I said and meant it. I had meant it under the mountain and I meant it beneath the glory of Starfall. Hope and love were dangerous because they were fragile and could be torn away so easily but I was prepared to put my life on the line for them. Maybe I always had been but somehow saying the words aloud made me believe it.

Below us the party twirled on. I caught Mor looking up at us once as I talked and she waved like it was an invitation to come and dance but I just shook my head.

"I told you I was not on offer for anyone and I wasn't. Not for you, not for the woman who had stared at Tamlin until he was out of sight, who had used the word 'us' when she spoke of the Spring Court, who had despised me since Under the Mountain. I would not hold you prisoner by force or by magic or by the customs of the mating bond," I said and then waited.

"So why tell me all that now?"

"Because you walked into the Court under the mountain of your own free will, because you threw a bone spear at Amarantha's head, because you stood against the Court of Nightmares like a queen, because you are no one's pet, because Cassian is impressed by you and Amren respects you, because Azriel trusts you and Mor adores you, and because just now, you told me you were proud to be my mate."

I wasn't ready to say the words aloud but the look on her face let me believe that maybe she could hear them under everything else I had said: because I love you and for the first time, I can almost believe that you would return that love if I offered it.

I reached out and touched a strand of her hair where it lay over her shoulder, splattered with the glowing remnants of a fallen star. She watched as I turned it in my fingers before I could gather enough of the words I needed to continue. It was soft and the glow was coming off on my fingers.

"The person you were then feared me deeply and the person you are now tried to shove me off a balcony and laughed in my face," I said.

"You aren't so scary," she said.

"I am very scary, ask anyone in Prythian," I said.

"If you ask anyone in Prythian, I am a faithless whore," she said.

"Then they can all go straight to hell," I said with a little more force than I think she expected.

She started to say something and then paused so I took her hands and ran my thumbs over the knuckles where the bones were no longer so prominent, where bruises from training showed how much stronger she was becoming. Her body was still a miracle and I still loved the details of it.

"They don't matter," I said more gently, "You matter. A mating bond is a gift from capricious fate. Fate has chosen torture and imprisonment for me, has decided that I should bury my family after I wasn't there to defend them. Fate also reached out into the world and brought you into my life but fate does not matter here. You matter. I want you to be the one to decide, Feyre. If you decide that you would choose me as your mate, then I will treasure that. If you would have me, I will stand with you for eternity."

She opened her mouth and I raised my hand and rested my finger against her lips.

"I want you to decide. Carefully."

"Can I make a request?" she asked.

"Ask me for anything, I would bring the stars to their knees for you."

She laughed at, looking back out at the sky before turning back to me and that beautiful smile was spread across her face as she said, "Is that what this is?"

"Behold my great and terrible power."

She laughed again and the grin didn't fade and neither did that bright look in her eyes. She said, "Here, I was just going to ask you to dance with me."

"We can dance all night."

"Even if I step on your toes?"

"Even then."

I took her back down to the music and the crowd and as the music slowed and she curled into my arms, I let hope roar in my ears. For the first time in a very long time, I did not try to quiet it. Hope and love were fragile and beautiful and worth everything it would take to protect them. My friends danced around us, my city celebrated below us and the sky fell to its knees above us and my mate was there with me in the middle of it all.

* * *

A final author's note:

* * *

From here, things progress as they do in canon. The tension during their training in the mountains is somewhat more intense because it is very out in the open now but they don't really have the time or the safety to make that leap. Upon bringing Rhys back to the camp after the attack, Feyre doesn't run because it wasn't a surprise to find out he was her mate. When they go to the cabin, they do it together.

I have some baggage about how Feyre's choices are treated by the novel and how Rhys keeps her in the dark is played as a romantic thing (even if it makes perfect sense in character, it still irks me) so this story is my way of working through that. What if she knew everything and always did? Also what if the book addressed the fact that it gives us examples of more than one unhappy mating bond and yet still holds the bond as some super magic love thing. Separating it out was important to me. Feyre and Rhys work because it isn't just that 'primal urge' it is all the ways that they balance and complete each other and the fact that they had fallen pretty ass-over-tits in love.

Honestly though, this story started because I was looking for smut prompts and found 'sex pollen' but decided after about 30 seconds of worldbuilding that led the damiana potion wasn't something that either of them would feel the need to choose but add that fertility drug layer and Rhys's comment about how Ianthe can't wait for Feyre and Tamlin to have babies. There's a heavy non-con element in sex pollen fics and this ended up coming down on that side of it where the drug turns a consensual relationship into something violating and awful.

And this has been a window into my process.

One last thing: a shout out to Elanorjoy for reading an early draft and helping me straighten out some of my issues with Rhys's characterization but if I fucked anything up, it was totally my fault not hers.


End file.
